This Indian-born guy was the first ever AirBnB guest

What do you do when you HAVE TO attend an important event in a new city, and most hotels are either full, or charging a bomb? What do you do when your landlord hikes your rent and you can’t pay that much? Combine the two, and there’s your answer. Necessity really is the mother of invention.

It was October 2007, and Amol had to attend the International Designer’s Conference in San Francisco. Too bad the hotels were charging over $ 300. He couldn’t make it there without a good hotel deal, and found a site.

“I found this website called Air Bed and Breakfast. I had no clue what an air bed or bed and breakfast was. I did an extensive online search and found Joe’s (Gebbia) contact number. They didn’t expect someone to be desperate to stay with them, but I was”, Amol says now.

Cut to Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk. The trio happened to be living in San Francisco at the time, and their landlord hiked their rent by over 25%. They just couldn’t afford it.

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“They had quit their jobs to be entrepreneurs, also known as unemployed”, Nathan chuckles now. “That’s when we had the idea, why not rent out the bedroom to designers coming into town”, he says.

So Nathan moved out, and AirBnB started.

“It wasn’t much of a bedroom. There were no beds, so instead of calling it a bed and breakfast, Joe put on an air bed, and called it air bed and breakfast”, Nathan says. Amol paid $80 a night, stayed for 5 nights and became the first of 80 million AirBnB guests.

That weekend the trio hosted three guests, a 35 year old woman from Boston, a father of four from Utah and Amol. They made a cool $1000. Later the boys sat thinking if such a diverse group found their offering interesting, there could be a real business opportunity there.

You know the rest of the story.

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